jQuery Mobile 1.0 Released

Posted by Todd on 11/17/2011

When John Resig asked Filament Group to lead this exciting new project
about 18 months ago, we had no idea where this would take us. Today, we
are so thrilled to announce that jQuery Mobile has reached 1.0 status.

From the time we first launched the jQuery Mobile site last summer, we
were overwhelmed by the enthusiastic response to the principles of the
framework. At the time we announced the project, most mobile developers
and frameworks had adopted a pretty narrow target: iOS and maybe
Android. In our mind, this was a very narrow slice of the web and left
many billions of people unable to access important content and tools.

We knew there was an incredible opportunity to take a fresh look at the
problem. At Filament Group, our goal is to strive for universal access
-- that's what web is all about. For us, that meant that this project
should embrace "one web" principles to ensure it worked on any device
and for everyone.

We chose the challenging task of making this work on all popular mobile,
tablet, e-reader and desktop browsers because the lines between these
are blurring so quickly, only a broadly compatible and responsive design
system would be future friendly foundation for this project. It took a
lot of work, but I'm happy to announce that jQuery Mobile does indeed
work pretty much anywhere, including
feature phones and older browsers though our use of progressive
enhancement. We also spent a lot of time testing and adding
accessibility features to support screen readers like VoiceOver to
ensure that nobody is left behind.

The other part of the universal access equation is making a JavaScript
UI like jQuery Mobile toolkit easy to use and I think we've succeeded on
that front by exposing all the configuration through HTML5 data-
attributes which allows a less technical person to build a complex,
AJAX-driven mobile app with simple HTML. Take a look at the getting
started
guide to
get a sense of how easy it is to build a mobile website or app with
jQuery Mobile. To make building custom themes, we designed the
ThemeRoller tool to make it
drop-dead simple to create a theme and download the stylesheet.

For a project that just turned 1.0
today,
we already have a vibrant community of plugin and tool developers, eight
published books (many more on the way), hundreds of sites and apps in
production, and a ton of articles and tutorials. We've collected the
best of these on a resources page
on the mobile site. To get started, check out the demos and
documentation site.

We'd like to thank all the sponsors and contributors to jQuery Mobile.
It has been an honor to be part of this project and look forward to 1.1.
A huge thanks goes out to Jorge Taylor, Kin
Blas, John
Bender and Tyler
Benziger, and Ghislain
Seguin for their incredible work this
year on the project, we couldn't have done it without you guys.

We've been pretty quiet here at the lab on the topic of jQuery Mobile
because I've been writing more of the week-to-week updates over on the
jQuery Mobile blog but look for us to be sharing ideas about how to use
and extend the mobile framework.

Comments

wow it released. Really it fantastic and I like it very much. I will buy it soon…
I like sites like http://www.sellmyapplication.com which allow iphone and android developers to sell their app code to other app developers.

Congrats
“only a broadly compatible and responsive design system would be future friendly foundation for this project"…
This is king of confusing. How does this project stand in relation to the responsive design paradigm as a whole?